On intermediaries' inquiring minds, elicitation styles, and user satisfaction

Abstract

Building upon previous research on the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles (Wu, 2005;Wu & Liu, 2003), this study aims to identify the relationships between the theoretical constructs of elicitation behavior and user satisfaction in terms of the relevance, utility, and satisfaction of search results, search interaction processes, and overall search activities. Descriptive statistical analysis is applied to compare the user satisfaction ratings with respect to the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles. The results suggest that the stereotyped elicitation style received the lowest user satisfaction ratings compared with functionally and situationally oriented styles. It is suggested that the intermediaries take into account the characteristics of search questions and, accordingly, adapt their professional mindsets to search interview situations; that is, using an inquiring mind in the query formulation process as default mode with functional and situational styles of elicitations would be helpful for enhancing the user's satisfaction ratings. Future research is suggested to better understand and to improve professional talk in information services.

Investigating the role of eye movements and physiological signals in search satisfaction prediction using geometric analysis

“…Satisfaction as an evaluative criterion takes explicit account of the user and involves most of the components of IR interaction (Belkin & Vickery, 1985;L. T. Su, 2003;M.-M. Wu & Liu, 2011). It is strongly correlated with certain evaluation metrics, such as cumulative gain (CG) and discounted cumulative gain (DCG) (Al-Maskari, Sanderson, & Clough, 2007); therefore, user satisfaction is sometimes referred to as the gold standard in search performance evaluation (Zhang et al, 2018).…”

“…Since search satisfaction is important user feedback for search system optimization, predicting search satisfaction is one of the major concerns in search evaluation studies (Liu et al, 2015). User satisfaction assesses the overall impact of the cognitive and communicative aspects of user-intermediary interactions (M.-M. Wu & Liu, 2011); therefore, we believe that NP signals may provide more precise predictions of search quality and deepen our understanding of users' satisfaction expected certain invariant properties that describe EDA graph and eye movements to remain unchanged under certain transformations. Yau classified geometric invariants into orthogonal, affine, conformal, projective, and homological geometries (Yau, 2014).…”

On sociocultural aspects of user elicitation

“…An utterance is a speech sequence contributed by one participant during the conversation. An elicitation is a verbal request for information to fill the gaps in people's internal state of knowledge that reveals the speaker's intention to invite or request information from the other party (see [42,43,44] for more details; cf. [6,34]).…”

“…Specifically, an elicitation is a verbal request for information to fill the gaps in people's internal state of knowledge that reveals the speaker's intention to invite or request information (see e.g., [42,43,44]). This thread of research can be traced back to Taylor's information filters [36,37], Belkin's ASK (anomalous states of knowledge) and functional specifications of retrieval discourse [2,4], Ingwersen's cognitive IR framework [15], Saracevic's user modeling through user intermediary interactions [28] and the information seeking and mediated search project [12].…”

“…More recently, this thread of research has been extended to elicitation as linguistic and communicative behavior manifested by the use of language (see e.g., [33,43,44]). The linguistic and communicative levels of analysis provide a lens into the sociocultural aspects of elicitation through the use of language in interaction.…”